As I'm planning to put more Fusion tutorials and example flows online I thought I could combine everything in one thread. So here's a repost of two of my older examples and a brand new one.

I plan to add to this thread whenever I've got something new to show. Hopefully this will be a good ressource for all your compositing needs.

==================================================

Example of a full flow (from my shortfilm Catharsis)

I thought it would be helpfull to you if I uploaded an example flow I did for my final MA animation last year.

I did my compositing in Fusion 4 but as 5 is the most recent version I re-built the flow in Fusion 5. The outcome of the flow is not exactly as it is in my animation but Fusion5 works a bit different from 4 so it's hard to exactly rebuild a flow. There are some problems with it too (like some pixelated alphas/masks) but I guess it can be helpfull anyway.

It's not the most advanced compositing ever done and I didn't render in a lot of passes. If you are just starting out I'd suggest you break everything down in as much passes as you can because it helps a lot to have everything seperate. That makes it a lot easier to fix render problems. But well, as you become more experience maybe you notice that it doesn't really make a difference for that specific rendering to have the highlights for example on a seperate pass but it's just faster to render everything in one image. I only have AmbientOcclusion on a seperate pass and everything else in combined in my beauty pass. You shouldn't do it that way when you're starting out! Render a lot more passes (diffuse, lighting, ao, highlights, reflections,...).

Very usefull when you've got multiple objects in your render which are on the same pass. Mostly used for colourgrading this is a very usefull technique to keep the amount of passes you render low. It also gives you great fexibility on grading your final output just right as you can edit all parts on an image seperately. Additionally a RGB-Matte renders super fast.

The magic lies mostly in the "Bitmap" nodes and their "Channel" option.

This is a very simple one. It's just combining a lot of passes that your render produced (Illumination, Shadows, AO, reflections,...).

It's how every composite should start. You put together all the passes your rendered and then you add to it. Once you've got a setup like in this flow you can start adding colour correctors anywhere in the flow you need them and loads of other nodes which can make a rendering so much better.

Just a notice: I renamed all my Merge nodes so they explain what they are merging. A node called "MrgOcclusion" for example is a simple Merge node that is merging the Occlusion pass to the rest. It makes finding your passes again for altering them later a lot easier when you rename some nodes to more meaningfull names than "Merge253". There is some info inside the ColourBoolean node which explains what this node does.

And as always - if you've got any requests of Fusion examples that I should do please let me know.

stevecullum

10-20-2007, 01:37 AM

Thanks for posting these. Always good to look at other peoples workflow - learn some new tricks everytime! :)

SanjayChand

10-20-2007, 05:23 AM

sweet!

thanks man.

:thumbsup:

S3b

10-20-2007, 03:18 PM

Thank you very much!! I was looking for something like this.

regards,
S3b

hakanpersson

10-21-2007, 09:02 PM

Thanks alot. I am new to DF so I was just looking around for some help with depth blur. Really kind to release a full composite like this.

Cheers, Håkan

ragecg

10-21-2007, 09:05 PM

Dude, this is frickin sweet, and kind of you:)

Please keep them coming, as seeing your flows, and breaking them down, personaly helped me find new ways of using even basic tools like channel boolean:)

Ringas

10-23-2007, 07:29 AM

Thanks for these.

However, Fusion 5.1 crashes when opening the rgbmatte and catharsis examples.

Anyone else having this?

Creature

10-23-2007, 09:44 AM

Does it open the basic-putting-render-passes-together one? I did all the flows in Fusion 5.2. Maybe that's the problem. But I'm not using any of the new 5.2 nodes like Vector Motion Blur

Ringas

10-23-2007, 08:27 PM

Nevermind, works just fine in 5.2

I have recently been doing the same thing using RPFs with MatIDs and ObjIDs.
This way, I can control more objects.

http://www.ringas.com/pub/MatID_Comp.rar

PsychoSilence

11-02-2007, 03:49 PM

great! thanks for sharing those!!!

anselm

Creature

11-02-2007, 06:45 PM

My pleasure.

Any requests for examples or particular problems/areas/themes with fusion compositing you'd like me to adress?

PsychoSilence

11-02-2007, 08:52 PM

it is very noble from you to ask and your skills show that you could help indeed already :)
i just started a thread in the fusion root forum:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=11&t=557064

und ich kann sogar in deutsch fragen, yippee!!

Creature

11-03-2007, 04:11 PM

This is a bit more unusual (some would say useless :biggrin: ). You can use Fusion to light and texture your rendering. I haven't found a really practical use for this. But it's there and could be used to some extend to test different (very basic) lighting setups or maybe produce cubes with animated text textures on them

This is a bit more unusual (some would say useless :biggrin: ). You can use Fusion to light and texture your rendering. I haven't found a really practical use for this. But it's there and could be used to some extend to test different (very basic) lighting setups or maybe produce cubes with animated text textures on them

I would say that this is incredibly useful to be able to do in production....

Sometimes the geometry is just too complex to do in the 3D part of Fusion (I'm guessing here - I'm not a Fusion user) so you have to use the normals pass to relight it. I'm thinking something like an ocean stretching off into the distance...

And I've used a UV texture pass many many times for doing things like reflecting or refracting a card. Then the 3D render only needs to be done once with the UV card rather than every time the card being reflected or refracted is changed...

Creature

11-04-2007, 12:38 PM

Yep - the re-texturing can be really usefull. One thing that comes to my mind is putting footage on 3d computer monitors or tv screens for example. No tracking or trying to fit the footage on the screen - just use the UVs. Another usefull application would be packshots in tv commercials that need to be done in various languages. Way easier to put the different texts on in post.

The re-lighting bit .... Well, it's really very basic lighting. One light plus ambient only and no shadows. Not sure how that could be used. Maybe for more graphic effects. Bringing some depth into stylish vector-graphic-like shots maybe.

Hugh

11-04-2007, 12:56 PM

well, you could get as many lights as you want separately and then just add them together...

Going back to the water example I mentioned earlier....

I did a shot over the summer which had a load of plates being comped together in the background - sky, mountains, house, matte painting and lightning in the sky.

Using just a normal and position pass (and camera position info) I could reflect the background in the water, add a bit of ambient light, and the occasionaly very directional light when there was a lightning flash.

Creature

11-04-2007, 01:20 PM

well, you could get as many lights as you want separately and then just add them together...

Stupid me - I have to admit that thought never occured to me. That you can use more than one Shader node. Ah... must be my age :D

ahmedsheeraz

11-09-2007, 03:33 PM

very useful tips.....thanx for sharing.

Creature

11-19-2007, 04:48 PM

How to replace your renderings with files in a different location

No flow to download this time - just a very quick tip.

You've got millions and millions of Loaders in your scene that are loading all the passes you rendered. The path for your renderings is c:\cool_animation\renderings\version1

Now you fiddle with your 3d setup a bit and decide that it looks a lot better now so you re-render to this path: c:\cool_animation\renderings\version2

Do you really have to replace the path in millions and millions of Loader nodes manually? Of course not! Here's what you do.

There is a script in your Script-Menu that is installed by default with Fusion. It's called "Change Paths" and it does just that. You enter your old path and the new one you want the old one replaced by and click OK to start the convertion process. There's also an option where you can choose if you want to affect Loaders, Savers and/or Proxyfiles.

I suggest you take a look through the scripts that come with Fusion. There are quite a lot of handy ones and most of them are pretty self explanatory.

theotheo

11-20-2007, 10:52 AM

Creature, thats a great tip. And some great flows you've posted.

Another way to do it is by editing the .comp file, since it is written in ascii you can just search and replace as well.

cheers,

-the0

PsychoSilence

11-22-2007, 05:53 PM

still learning channel booleans... :( what if i wanna colorchange only the greentones? lets say make all the greens red?

EDIT: DID find it out myself in the meantime. thanks in advance anyways!...bitmap masks can do that...

PsychoSilence

11-23-2007, 10:25 AM

i was wondering too how i can pull out all the information like UV, Normals, Specular, refelction etc. out of one single image. i usually render EXR images and save render elements into it... :( sorry for keeping to bother you. i think channel booleans do the job...

i owe you at least one beer already! :beer:

Creature

11-26-2007, 10:09 AM

Can OpenEXR files hold UV information? Didn't know that. It there actually is an UV channel in an exr file Fusion should recognize this. If not Channel Boolean is the way to go. With that node you can copy information from one channel to another.

theotheo

11-26-2007, 03:40 PM

creature, yes fusion can load openExr files rendered with UV channels. I'm using it with mr and max scanline.

PsychoSilence, yep the channel boolean tool is used to extract the aux channels from an exr file. However fusion does not support multilayered ext files just yet. So only support for the aux channels such as normal,uv,id,mat,velocity etc. But not custom passes.

-the0

PsychoSilence

11-27-2007, 01:40 AM

creature, yes fusion can load openExr files rendered with UV channels. I'm using it with mr and max scanline.

PsychoSilence, yep the channel boolean tool is used to extract the aux channels from an exr file. However fusion does not support multilayered ext files just yet. So only support for the aux channels such as normal,uv,id,mat,velocity etc. But not custom passes.

-the0

oh thats good and important to know! thanks for the info, bro!

kind regards,
anselm

izyk

11-29-2007, 01:41 AM

Thanks for these.

However, Fusion 5.1 crashes when opening the rgbmatte and catharsis examples.

Anyone else having this?

That will happen if the comp was saved in Fusion 5.2. There was a change in the way LUT's are stored - and every composition has at least one LUT.

I do have a script that will often make a composition saved in 5.2 loadable in 5.1. I have attached a copy of the converted composition, as well as the script I used to convert it.

Hope that helps!

PsychoSilence

11-29-2007, 09:56 AM

you rock, buddy!

ill try immediate!

moidphotos

11-30-2007, 09:32 PM

Thanks Izyk, the file opens although something very strange happens to the leaves and I don't know enough Fusion to understand what yet... but it's great to get this open and see how Creature laid the flow out.

Creature

11-30-2007, 09:47 PM

I do have a script that will often make a composition saved in 5.2 loadable in 5.1. I have attached a copy of the converted composition, as well as the script I used to convert it.

Thanks a lot for converting. Didn't know that they changed the LUTs.

To explain LUTs very quickly (and cruedely) to those who might not have heard of them: LUTs are LookUpTables. These tables are used to display image files with higher bit depth on 8bit (16.7million colours) computer monitors. If you've got a source like Cineon files that have a bit depth of 10 you need a way to map the higher bit depth to the bit depth your computermonitor can display. That's what LUTs are for (among other things).
A better explanation of LUTs can be found here (http://www.sli.unimelb.edu.au/envis/automap/colordepth.html) for those who are interested.

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